Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic

By Dustin Gish

The emergence of the early American republic as a new nation on the world stage conjured rival visions in the eyes of leading statesmen at home and attentive observers abroad. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the newly independent states as a federation of republics united by common experience, mutual interest, and an adherence to principles of natural rights. His views on popular government and the American experiment in republicanism, and later the expansion of its empire of liberty, offered an influential account of the new nation. While persuasive in crucial respects, his vision of early America did not stand alone as an unrivaled model.

The contributors to Rival Visions examine how Jefferson’s contemporaries—including Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall—articulated their visions for the early American republic. Even beyond America, in this age of successive revolutions and crises, foreign statesmen began to formulate their own accounts of the new nation, its character, and its future prospects. This volume reveals how these vigorous debates and competing rival visions defined the early American republic in the formative epoch after the revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813944487

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Rival Visions

Jeffersonian America

Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter S. Onuf, Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, and Robert G. Parkinson, Editors

Rival Visions

How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic

Edited by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gish, Dustin A., editor. | Bibby, Andrew, editor.

Title: Rival visions : how Jefferson and his contemporaries defined the early American republic / Edited by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Series: Jeffersonian America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020039799 (print) | LCCN 2020039800 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813944470 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813944487 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Political and social views. | United States—Politics and government—Philosophy. | United States—Politics and government—1775–1783. | United States—Foreign public opinion. | Republicanism—United States—History. | Representative government and representation—United States—History. | United States—Foreign public opinion.

Classification: LCC E332.2 .R58 2021 (print) | LCC E332.2 (ebook) | DDC 320.973/09033—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039799

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039800

Cover art: Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton fresco in U.S. Capitol, photograph by Theodor Horydczak, c. 1920–1950 (Theodor Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Offer prayers for me at that shrine to which, tho’ absent, I pay continual devotion. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the fore-ground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away, and it is no picture for me.

—Thomas Jefferson, of his beloved future wife, Martha Wayles (Monticello, August 3, 1771)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Envisioning the New Nation

Rival Histories: The Early American Republic’s Quarrel with Time

Eran Shalev

The Philosophical Politics of Jefferson and Adams

Darren Staloff

An American Abroad: Jeffersonian Diplomacy and Early American Nationalism

Dustin Gish

The French Revolution, the Election of 1800, and the Character of the American Nation: A Transatlantic Perspective

Armin Mattes

Part Two: National Tensions in the Early Republic

The Public Interest of Religion in the New Nation

Daniel L. Dreisbach

Jefferson, Madison, Adams: Conversations on Religious Liberty

John Ragosta

Slavery in Jefferson’s Worlds: Monticello, America, and Beyond

Christa Dierksheide

Washington and Jefferson: American Nationhood and the Problem of Slavery

Peter S. Onuf

Part Three: Constitutional Controversies

Work, Character, and the Moral Sense in the Early American Republic

Jean Yarbrough

Technology, Progress, and Early American Constitutionalism

Daniel Klinghard

An Enduring Political Rivalry: Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall

Charles Hobson

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The original inspiration for this volume came following a conference on Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries hosted in 2013 by the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Attended by most of the contributors in this volume, the conference broadened and deepened our conception of the founding era through a focus on the continuing and significant rival visions of the new nation in the American republic’s tenuous and formative early decades. The conference, made possible by a generous grant from the Jack Miller Center, brought together scholars in political science, history, and American studies from an array of academic institutions (including the University of Virginia, College of William and Mary, College of the Holy Cross, Rutgers University, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello). All agreed that the subject of the conference warranted further study and offered a revealing thematic approach for a volume dedicated to the proposition that the early American republic was a work-in-progress, wrought from contested founding visions and persistent rivalries.

We are grateful to the co-Directors of the Center for American Studies, Elizabeth Busch and Nathan Busch, as well as their colleague Jonathan White, for sponsoring the conference. The path to eventual publication of this volume proved unexpectedly prolonged, in part due to our own departures to the University of Houston and Utah Valley University. We owe an obligation, gratefully acknowledged, to our home institutions and especially to Bill Monroe (Dean of the Honors College at UH) and Rodney Smith (Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at UVU) both for their friendship and for their support of our scholarly endeavors. Peter Onuf provided encouragement at every stage from the genesis to completion of this project, and we are indebted to him for his indefatigable spirit in promoting the study of Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic. We also benefited from the advice of the Senior Executive Editor for UVA Press, Dick Holway, who kept this project moving forward, and (following his recent retirement) from the enthusiasm of his successor, Nadine Zimmerli, who adeptly managed to guide the volume finally to publication. We thank Trinity Rinear for her assistance with the index. The dedication of this volume—borrowing the words of Jefferson himself, which are so often without rival—acknowledges the profound devotion that is offered to a cherished companion whose presence gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness.

Introduction

The emergence of the United States of America as a new republic on the world stage capable of persisting through its first decades put to rest some longstanding fears and old doubts about the viability of popular government. In the tumultuous era of its early formation, the American Republic managed not only to survive but to strengthen. As the nation moved beyond infancy into vigorous youthful maturity, the internal political struggles and rivalries that emerged, while contentious, also became a source of vitality. Centralized monarchy no longer represented the only regime compatible with liberty and stability. Popular government and democracy on the grand scale of a modern nation-state proved both viable and successful. Revolutionary resistance to tyranny had given way to constitution-drafting and nation-building; a people, isolated from the rest of the world, distinct in their regional identities, and jealous of their liberties, had set aside most of their differences to unite and form a nation that would be strong as well as free.

In many important respects, the ratification and implementation of the 1787 Constitution was a powerful rebuttal to critics of the American experiment at home and abroad. Yet few Americans would have claimed, during the first years, that ratification was the beginning of an end to urgent political questions. New questions and doubts soon replaced the displaced ones. What is republican liberty, and how is it best secured? What are the conditions for equality? What kind of republic and what kind of economic system should the United States, despite their differences, embrace going forward? On these questions, the great political thinkers of the liberal tradition during the eighteenth century—John Locke, Montesquieu, David Hume, William Blackstone—offered only general guidance. Out of this theoretical debate, the authors, thinkers, and political observers of the new republic and nation began to fashion a distinctly American tradition of political thought. What emerged was less a consensus, as historians such as Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter have argued, than an intellectual upheaval. From 1776 to 1820, leading American statesmen at home as well as attentive observers abroad began the process of articulating a number of distinct intellectual traditions, focused not on the world-historical debate between ancients and moderns but on the historically grounded tensions between and within a rich variety of possible forms of modern republicanisms. In this book, we refer to these emerging political debates and the intellectual period that encapsulates them as rival visions of the Early American Republic. A dedicated study of these contested visions is a unique and timely approach to understanding the emerging American identity. This volume highlights the centrality of Thomas Jefferson as a touchstone for the vigorous debates and competing rival visions that dominated the Early Republic. In his own views as well as in conversations with his friends and in disagreements with his critics, the often-enigmatic Jefferson stands out as a representative of the age in dialogue with his contemporaries. Through the essays herein, this volume aims to study Jeffersonian America as it emerged from a crucible of intense rivalry.

Contributors to this volume agree generally on two principle themes. First, that the high level of intellectual inquiry on display in these early debates about the American identity have been overtaken, in recent times, by a disturbing ideological conformity, and a correspondingly reflexive and dogmatic partisanship. Second, our contributors view Jefferson as a benchmark for understanding how these debates transformed American life and the way in which American public discourse has changed over time. While persuasive in some respects, Jefferson’s vision of early America did not always win out, and, even insofar as it proved coherent in itself, his vision of the new nation certainly did not stand alone as an uncontested paradigm. Among his greatest contemporaries were Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall, who articulated their own visions for the early American Republic, along with and over against that of Jefferson, each vying to form an unshaped nation. Even beyond the United States, these internal debates shaped an age of successive revolutions and crises, as foreign statesmen began to formulate their own accounts of the virtues and limitations of modern democratic and commercial republicanism.

The advantage of this dialogic approach to studying the American founding era is twofold. It allows readers to think about the new nation not through the lens of a grand synthesis or dominant vision but in terms of experimental concepts of nationhood incorporating diverse undercurrents and competing ideas. It also provides analytical structure and coherence. Contributors to this volume include leading American historians, political theorists, biographers, and constitutional scholars, all of whom, in their mutual focus on rival visions of the new nation, help to set contemporary partisan divides in historical context. Previous studies of Thomas Jefferson and early America tend to highlight the lives of prominent individuals and their impact on events, or focus on isolated collaborations (Jefferson-Madison) and well-known rivalries among founders (Jefferson versus Adams, Hamilton, or Marshall). This volume sees rivalry itself as a constitutive feature of the new nation; its essays revive and clarify unsettled disputes, explore significant aspects of rivalries that were not readily apparent, and expand our knowledge of competing visions of America from abroad. With this approach, we deepen our understanding of the critical tensions and controversies that defined the early American Republic, and that continue to define America—insofar as rivalry, more so than resolution, is fundamental to the American experience.

The collection of essays is divided into three parts, reflecting the distinct but related contents and scope of the contributions: the contested formation of the early American Republic, with an emphasis on the impression and place of the new nation on the international stage; the challenge of overcoming national tensions over religion and slavery that threatened American republicanism; and moral, economic, and political controversies that shaped the first decades of the nation and the legacy of early America. Just as we must resist the temptation to reduce the enigmatic character and legacy of Jefferson himself to a single, unified account, so too must Jeffersonian America be studied as an irreducible nexus of enlightened experiments, competing conceptions, and rival visions. In a nation founded on such constitutive rivalries, conflict more than consensus reveals deeper layers to our political and philosophical commitments.

Beginning with an acute awareness that the new nation had no choice but to define itself over against the history and traditions of Europe, and working through competing views of America from both within and abroad, this volume approaches early America as incorporating the intense rivalry of major visions—none of which were conceived in isolation, nor emerged as finally triumphant. The study of such contests, in this volume, is broadened to include foreign perspectives as well, thus complicating and deepening our knowledge of early America. The narrative of American exceptionalism, originating with Tom Paine and continuing to vex visions of America today, inevitably situates the new nation as coming to birth over against and in opposition to histories and traditions of Europe. But the study of views of America presented by interested observers abroad reveals that the New World, from the outset of the revolution through its early years, leaned heavily upon the Old World to create its national identity.

Moreover, even as Americans imagined and fashioned for themselves a new nation, foreign commentators reflected on the revolutionary vision of America that was being projected on to the international stage. The transatlantic vision of America derived, in part, from more detached, theoretical perspectives; the contributions of Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and John Quincy Adams to the new American narrative emerged in contention with visions of America put forward by prominent European commentators, such as Abbé Raynal, Comte de Buffon, Turgot, and Friedrich von Gentz. Foreign perspectives on America, which were circulated in writing, provoked an outpouring of America political literature in the period. But this alternative perspective also showed a partisan edge that affected diplomatic affairs and shaped political developments in the young nation.

The vitriolic and ideological debates between Jeffersonians and Federalists in the 1790s, for example, had its deepest roots in the respective experiences of Jefferson and Adams, who were both American statesmen living and working abroad during the revolutionary struggle for independence and the early constitutional quarrels. The familiar internal rivalry in the later period over the character and future of the new American nation thus cannot be fully understood apart from the representation of events unfolding in Europe, which, in turn, had been directly informed by foreign visions of revolutionary and republican America. Rival visions for an American form of Enlightenment politics were molded by and inseparable from transatlantic accounts of the new nation and its meaning.

In recovering the active debates between major statesmen at the founding, we also reawaken vital rivalries between Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and others, each of which captures the dispute over national identity and the genius of the American people, while at the same time charting new territory. For example, while Hamilton’s vision has often been held to have defeated Jefferson’s views on the agrarian republic, presciently anticipating and even shaping the course of economic development in the new nation, a fresh look at this rivalry shows Jefferson’s more skeptical view of the place of capitalism within the early American republic to be a consistent refrain in American thought, and one that remains especially instructive today. So too, by studying their rivalry more closely, we discover points of contact that have been neglected; for example, the fact that Jefferson, despite his principled opposition to Hamilton’s vision of manufactures and industrial progress, nevertheless remained a steadfast proponent of American Enlightenment, incorporating into his vision for America a confidence in the capacity for technology to strength rather than weaken the perpetuation of republican ideals. These subtle and unexplored aspects of their otherwise well-known rivalry point to fundamental differences in principle that gave rise to their more familiar political quarrels.

Similarly, in returning to the well-known disputes between Jefferson and Marshall, who made no secret of their differences, we see how their long personal quarrel merged into a much broader, institutional dispute about government, animated by contested visions for constitutional balance, thus creating an enduring political and constitutional rivalry in American political history. Opposing perspectives on the role of religion in America, and especially Jefferson’s own complex views on the topic, are also to be seen as having been born out of the Early American Republic’s continuing atmosphere of intense rivalry and debate between visionary statesmen like Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. Even the long-standing crisis posed by slavery and its effect upon the new nation must be placed in this context of rivalry. Here, our understanding of Jefferson and Washington, two major founders not frequently studied in juxtaposition to each other, benefits from their being seen as quiet rivals with conflicting visions regarding the intractable problem of American slavery in relation to republican nationalism. Washington’s vision for a strong national government, which Jefferson so stridently opposed, kept alive the constitutional capacity for the future emancipation of enslaved persons; while the Jeffersonian vision of republicanism that won out over Washington’s Federalist legacy, although it initially allowed for slavery’s perpetuation and expansion, eventually inspired the cause of Lincoln and led to slavery’s final eradication. Of course, the legacy of the solution to this problem, and the tense dispute it embodied between national means and republican principles, continues to provoke within the republic rival visions of early American nationhood.

Thus, while a Jeffersonian vision for America plays a prominent role in several essays, it is placed in dialogue with rival views articulated by American and European contemporaries. In delineating and clarifying disputes that arose among these figures, we gain a more profound awareness of the diversity of accounts both of the new nation and its government that animated Jeffersonian America—especially with regard to the foundational principles and practices of the early American Republic, its democratic and republican character, constitutionalism, America’s revolutionary role in international affairs, and the national controversies and tensions that were, and still are, inherent within American public life.

Part One

Envisioning the New Nation

Part one focuses on the republican character of the new nation and its place in history. Each essay weaves into its presentation rival visions articulated by Jefferson’s contemporaries on key problems confronting the new American republic. We open with the broader rhetorical problem of fashioning a unique self-understanding of the new nation in light of historical and ideological precedents from the past. The prospects for the new American republic also depended upon near-term success in formulating national diplomatic policy and generating a revolutionary form of republican politics that would begin to define the place of the United States of America within the existing framework of international powers.

Rival Histories

The Early American Republic’s Quarrel with Time

Eran Shalev

In the summer of 1776, colonial British North Americans declared their independence from the empire and established a republic. This bold act caused numerous practical problems, which would be impressively dealt with, if only partly solved, a decade later with the ratification of a federal constitution. However, national independence also generated a lasting intellectual problem: the American union of states was a modern polity, but as such it was a nation that lacked firm historical precedence. Numerous citizens of the early United States rose to the challenge of rationalizing and justifying and placing their revolutionary political experiment in a historical context. They did so by elaborating compelling historical narratives, in light of which they attempted to describe and glorify their republic. The generation of founders thus presented themselves as the predecessors of free Anglo-Saxons and drew on classical polities, from Carthage to Athens and especially Rome. They lengthily compared themselves to the biblical Israelite federation and their leaders to Old Testament figures. They studied the mistakes of the more recent confederacies such as the Swiss and the Dutch. They also observed allegedly timeless (and thus history-less) Native Americans to validate their republicanism in an age when the major European nations were ruled by absolutist monarchs.

The absence of ancient European ruins and traces on the American landscape could—perhaps should—have created an American present undetermined by the past, a history that could actually begin at the beginning, with the founding.¹ Early American citizens continually appealed, however, to history to trace and analyze the tension between attempts to conduct a modern revolution and to found a nation. They were deeply attracted to and reliant on the past to explain their accomplishments.² Hence, we cannot properly understand the political choices and claims made by the generation of American state builders unless we realize the crucial role that history had in forming their political worldviews. Without a full grasp of the nature and scope of their attraction to history, and the importance of a historical frame for political action, we cannot fully appreciate how revolutionary-age political actors decided to make the break from Britain, how they justified that rupture, and how they constructed their new, independent states and federal union. Taking the Anglo-Saxonism of Thomas Jefferson as a starting point for the various pasts to which Americans in the Early Republic appealed, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which revolutionary-era Americans were compelled to represent and understand their actions in terms of historical analogy as well as explore the deep relationship of history, revolution, and political imagination in the late eighteenth century.

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As a member of the committee (along with Benjamin Franklin) to design a Great Seal for the new United States, Thomas Jefferson proposed in July 1776 an impression that would render Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Germanic brothers who were the first to settle England. Jefferson’s recommendation was characteristic at a time in which the Anglo-Saxons provided revolutionary white Americans with a common paradigm for a free society ruled by law. Anglo-Saxon history offered a narrative of a people exerting their right to relinquish their country and associating together into a new free political society and independent state. Patriot Americans readily recognized this historical pattern from their own past, identified with it, and adopted it without hesitation as imperial tensions grew.

Revolutionaries found the Dark Age Germanic tribes, who stemmed from the thick of northern Europe’s forests and settled the English isle in the early fifth century, especially attractive during the decade of resistance to British attempts to tax the North American colonies (1765–75). They were fascinated by the free and raw form of government that the Anglo-Saxons imported with them to England, which enabled the English, so was commonly believed, to retain their identity as a free people through centuries of conquests and upheavals. Hence, while American colonists argued against parliamentary arbitrariness, they repeatedly appealed to an Anglo-Saxon golden age of freedom. Patriots viewed the actions of the English Parliament through the prism of the Norman yoke that followed the age of the Anglo-Saxons and was meant to subdue their tenacious spirit of liberty, molded in the German forests and now given a new birth in the New World. Revolutionaries embraced this view of history, which has come to be called Whig, and positioned themselves in numerous speeches, sermons, and petitions as virtual and literal descendants of the Anglo-Saxons and their free society.

Revolutionary Americans made use of the Saxons as they scrambled for legalistic support for their argument for separation from Britain. Thomas Jefferson famously made such use of the Saxon past in his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) in which he reminded his audience that the Saxons, in like manner of American colonists, left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain, then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country. Like American colonists, the Saxons’ migration was voluntary and self imposed, but even more importantly, there was never any claim of superiority or dependence asserted over them by that mother country from which they had migrated; and were such a claim made, it is believed that his majesty’s subjects in Great Britain have too firm a feeling of the rights derived to them from their ancestors, to bow down the sovereignty of their state before such visionary pretensions. And it is thought that no circumstance has occurred to distinguish materially the British from the Saxon emigration.³

The role of the Saxons did not end, however, with similarity of circumstances and analogical legalistic logic, which was meant to prove that American colonials were no less under the dominion of Parliament than the British under a European dominion. Revolutionaries, such as Demophilus (possibly George Bryan), in his extensive The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxons (1776), identified extremely appealing aspects in the presumed Germanic political culture that would be useful for Americans to emulate. Demophilus pointed out that it is reported by historians that our Saxon forefathers had no kings in their own country, but lived in tribes or small communities, governed by laws of their own making, and magistrates of their own electing. With the Continental Congress providing Americans with a wartime ad hoc council and colonists searching for a more permanent solution for coordination and cooperation, the Saxons also presented an appealing union in which shires became united together into a kingdom. This raw tribal democracy thus seemed to demonstrate an appealing confederacy in which a number of these [Saxon] communities were united together for their mutual defence and protection. The famed Saxon Witenagemot, the meeting of the deputies of the people, was an admired example for prudent legislature. Whatever the American solution to the problem of governance would be, however, they would profit from the Saxon principles: wherever a combined interest was concerned and the people at large were affected by it, the immediate deputies of the people, met together to attend the respective interests of their constituents, and a majority of voices always bound the whole, and determined for any measure, that was supposed to operate for the good of the whole combined body.⁴ This medieval republicanism had a great appeal for Americans as they were preparing to take a leap into the revolutionary dark abyss.

As Americans reacted to the unfolding imperial crisis, they repeatedly commented on the small [Saxons] republics, which met in council upon their common concerns; and being all equally interested in every question that could be moved in their meetings. It was thus commonly held that the Saxons maintained that natural, wise and equal government, which has deservedly obtained the admiration of every civilized age and country. Hence, it was from the prevalence of that tradition that the Saxons have been enabled to astonish future generations, commissioned to treat with them, by displays of their sublime policy of equality and deliberation. It naturally followed that Americans should look at this ancient and justly admired pattern, the old Saxon form of government as the best model, that human wisdom . . . has left them to copy.⁵

Versed in Saxon political culture, revolutionary Americans used historical analogy in lieu of legal precedence. Underlying these readings, as well as the colonists’ case against Parliament, was the belief that English subjects lived under an ancient and unwritten customary constitution that guaranteed an array of cherished liberties, such as the right to consent to taxation, to be represented in parliaments, and to be tried before a jury of peers. That ancient and unwritten constitution was formed, so they argued, in northern Europe by Germanic tribes that exercised a rudimentary but pure democracy, and it limited monarchs who acted as agents of their free subjects, who legislated in a primeval parliament. This remote and pristine republican-like past was interrupted, according to the prevailing Whig narrative that revolutionaries gladly adopted, by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced tyranny and corruption into English governance. The unwritten constitution prevailed over Norman encroachments, however, and continued to restrain the sovereign and guaranteed liberties that came to be seen as essential to the identity of Englishmen.

English Commonwealthmen in the seventeenth century believed that from the earliest accounts of time, our ancestors in Germany were a free people, and had a right to assent or dissent to all laws; that right was exercised and preserved under the Saxon and Norman Kings, even to our days.⁶ Thrown into a world of revolutionary turmoil, Americans gladly concurred. The origin of these rights of English subjects was seen not only as Saxon but also as ageless, which was crucial to establishing their legitimacy. In such view the colonists understood themselves as the stewards and heirs of the Saxon tenacious spirit of liberty, molded in the German forests, exported across the channel to England, attacked during the Norman invasion, and tested under Tudor and Stuart constitutional battles. In the words of James Otis, liberty was better understood, and more fully enjoyed by our ancestors, before the coming in of the first Norman Tyrants than ever after.⁷ The proud boast of the English was that in spite of a variety of intrusions and usurpers they had been able, in marked contrast to most other political societies in Europe, to retain their identity as a free people who had secured their liberty through their dedication to what would be called rule of law. This Whig view of history positioned revolutionary Americans as the defenders of the ancient constitution, the last in a succession of similar battles that could be traced to the Anglo-Saxons.

The decade of resistance that led to independence was a prolonged moment in which Americans imagined themselves as ancient Britons fighting the forces of eternal corruption. They used history to guide them and to make sense of the unprecedented circumstances they encountered. But the usefulness of the Anglo-Saxon past had its limits, because the Anglo-Saxons were destined to become, well, English. Once legally and emotionally separated from Britain, Americans practically abandoned Anglo-Saxonism as a model for revolutionary ends.⁸ Americans needed non-British exempla to guide them through the high waters of revolution. Those waters were, it became clear, the Rubicon and the Red Sea.

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The usefulness of the Anglo-Saxon past had a limited shelf life. The reverse side of Jefferson’s proposed Great Seal appealed to another, more enduring model than the Anglo-Saxons: on the opposite face Jefferson recommended an episode from the Book of Exodus, the Children of Israel led by the pillar of fire in the desert. Decades later, as the president of the United States, Jefferson still harbored similar sentiments, appealing to the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life. That such biblical images and sacred language seeped even into the language of the deist Jefferson demonstrates how common understandings of America as a Second Israel became in public discourse of the early United States and how that image provided a constructive mode of political expression for an emerging American national culture.

The idea of America as a New Israel may have originated as an insular view that singled out Puritan New England as a chosen nation during the seventeenth century, but it reverberated and expanded with the onset of the revolution as Americans throughout the colonies-turned-states repeatedly heard that they were at present the People of Israel or were establishing our Israel. This image of an American people chosen for a special destiny would remain a mainstay of American self-fashioning and the negotiation of nationhood. The uses of biblical history evolved with the changing political needs: before independence, portrayals of Americans as enslaved Israelites, the British as Egyptian taskmasters, and George III as Pharaoh were prominent, thus casting the revolution as a latter-day story of Exodus. With the later need to accommodate processes associated with nation-building, other comparisons emerged, such as between the Israelite tribal federation governed by a Mosaic constitution and the American union and its federal Constitution.

The biblical history of ancient Israel provided early Americans with historical precedence for their experiment in federal republicanism, which encouraged many Americans to view their young republic, then and thereafter, as a chosen nation of latter-day Israelites. But it was the Exodus that dominated much of the political imagination and public discussions of revolutionary Americans, for the Exodus detailed how the Israelites, led by a charismatic and God-inspired Moses, escaped Pharaoh, roamed the wilderness for forty years, eventually conquered Canaan, and settled in the land of milk and honey. The story of the rise of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage captivated much of the political discussion throughout the American Revolution.

By the time of the revolution, appropriation of this Exodus already had a long history in the British North American colonies, especially in New England, where Puritan immigrants and succeeding generations interpreted the Great Migration of the 1630s as a crossing of the Red Sea and an escape from the British Egypt. In many accounts, the Exodus functioned as a towering narrative and trope, and it was fundamental in shaping the form and content of early American biblicism. The story of the enslaved Israelites who fled Egyptian tyranny, their election by God as His chosen people during their long sojourn in the desert, and their possession of the Promised Land, exerted tremendous influence over various segments of American society.

The Exodian trope was thus readily reshaped to function as a fundamental source for talking about politics and for exploring the meaning of nationhood in revolutionary America. It also enabled Americans who were enthralled in revolutionary dynamics to construct links between biblical Israel and what they perceived as the new, American Israel. In such prevalent understandings, God seemed to have selected a new American people to lead through the Red Sea of the revolution; with the creation of the United States, the New Israel seemed to have fully emerged, and the federal Constitution sealed a modern covenant, delivered by the hand of another Moses: George Washington.

The Exodus was certainly a story of an astounding deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egyptian bondage. Nevertheless, revolutionary preachers also portrayed the Exodus, perhaps more significantly, as a republican tale, a very signal instance of God’s appearing in favour of liberty, and frowning on tyrants. The God of Israel was a republican god, who shews how much he regards the rights of his people, and in how exemplary a manner, hard hearted tyrants, and merciless oppressors, sometimes feel his vengeance. Some, such as the minister Nicholas Street in his remarkable but characteristic sermon The American States Acting Over the Part of the Children of Israel in the Wilderness (1777), referred to the Exodus to elaborate the precarious American situation. Street’s impressive typological reading, coming at a time of dire straits for the young American confederacy, lengthily juxtaposed the history of the children of Israel in Egypt, their sufferings and oppression under the tyrant Pharaoh, their remarkable deliverance by the hands of Moses out of the state of bondage and oppression, and their trials and murmurings in the wilderness. In Street’s wartime jeremiad, Americans act[ed] over . . . the children of Israel in the wilderness, under the conduct of Moses and Aaron, who was leading them out of a state of bondage into a land of liberty and plenty in Canaan.⁹

As the revolution advanced, it became clear that the Exodus was not a model that applied merely to New England, and New Englanders were not the only ones who would employ it. Indeed, different speakers molded New England onto the sacred history of Israel and then extended that history to the whole of the new American nation. Such molding involved making typological sense of the relevance of the Exodus to the young United States. Americans outside of New England, particularly in the middle colonies-turned-states, were becoming accustomed to thinking that although they, like the Israelites in Egypt, were enslaved in foreign bondage, with a wilderness still before us, they should expect soon to cross the Red Sea of our difficulties.¹⁰

Interestingly, although crossing the Rubicon would arguably better describe the stakes before declaring American independence than crossing the Red Sea, the biblical metaphor seems to have been at least as popular as the classical one, especially during the early months of 1776 when the design for the Great Seal was proposed. Numerous references to the tyrannical English Pharaoh and his Israelite-American subjects-turned-enemies during the revolution attested to that popularity. After the war concluded, it manifest in Timothy Dwight’s epic metaphoric poem, The Conquest of Canaan (1785), which he dedicated to George Washington, the American Moses and now victorious Joshua. Exodus, in short, provided a key trope in the construction of the United States as a New Israel and would continue to exert its influence across centuries of American history, from the Puritans of colonial America to the enslaved African Americans of the nineteenth century, the Mormons, and the twentieth century’s civil rights movement.

Beyond the pervasiveness of the image of the American Israel and its centrality to the self-realization and identification of the young American nation, the Bible became a significant vehicle for political reflection during the turbulent late eighteenth century. As Americans struggled on the battlefield and strove to constitute a union out of the colonies-turned-states, they were also forced to come to terms with republican conceptions of politics, particularly with a demanding, virtue-based, civic-humanistic ideology. Consequently, they articulated a rich biblical idiom that extended much wider and deeper than the Exodus, which helped them to define the contents and limits of a revolutionary political discourse.¹¹

Revolutionary-era Americans frequently discussed, adapted, and absorbed the fundamentals of the republican doctrine through biblical (often Old Testament) narratives and figures. This blending of the Bible and republicanism enabled revolutionaries (and successive generations of Americans) to conciliate the distinct scriptural and classical worlds and harness them to advance immediate political goals. This biblical republicanism thus expands our understanding of the ways in which contemporaries constructed their political worldviews in light of the scriptures and sheds light on how the Bible helped them make revolutionary ideology and more generally the new American nation meaningful in its formative years. One of the major advantages of this emerging discourse was that virtually every patriot—not merely the formally educated elites—could potentially come to terms with civic-humanistic republicanism (an obscure and harsh creed, at least for the multitudes that lacked formal education) through the use of well-known biblical structures, narratives, forms, and metaphors. The Bible functioned throughout the era, in short, as the nation’s lingua franca.¹²

To understand the centrality of the Bible in making sense out of the revolution and the volatile world that it created, one needs to pay attention not only to biblical narratives and characters but also to the uses of its distinct language in political discourse. The language of the King James Bible was as strange and foreign to late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Anglophones as it is to twenty-first-century English speakers.¹³ The staccato rhythms confined in short and numbered verses, the repetitive use of phrases such as and it came to pass,